The Planning Moment: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories

“The Planning Moment provides a much-needed revision to the notion of a homogenous modernity and to top-down accounts of state planning. In recognizing the contested and often multiple futures that emerged from the disjuncture between plan and action, the book charts fresh directions past impasses that mark contemporary technophilia and technophobia.”―Orit Halpern, author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945

“This deeply interdisciplinary and transregional book emerges from anthropology, history, Science and Technology Studies, museum studies, and sociology, with essays spanning every continent. While each essay tells a highly localized story, together they help us reimagine imperial designs, postcolonial responses, and Cold War exigencies.”―Jini Kim Watson, author of Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization

Empires and their aftermaths were massive planning institutions. Over the last two centuries, colonial and postcolonial planning has shaped both the world we know and the disciplines through which we know it. Through twenty-seven case studies, The Planning Moment explores the centrality of planning to colonial and postcolonial worlds, through a range of disciplines: the history of science, science and technology studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, urban studies, and the history of knowledge.

If colonialism made certain landscapes, populations, and institutions legible while obscuring others, The Planning Moment reveals the frequently disruptive and violent processes of erasure in imperial planning by examining how “common sense” was produced and how the intransigence of planning persists long after decolonization. In recognizing the resistance and subversion that often met colonial plans, the book makes visible a range of strategies and techniques by which planning was modified and reappropriated, and by which decolonial futures might be imagined.

Sarah Blacker is Sessional Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University. Emily Brownell is Senior Lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Edinburgh. Anindita Nag is Professor at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture, Jindal Global University. Martina Schlünder is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Sarah van Beurden is Associate Professor of History and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. Helen Verran is University Professorial Fellow in the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University.